What's my tribe?

The game show of human history

A quiz show from the early days of television was called “What's My Line?” Celebrity panelists would question a mystery guest to determine the latter's line of work. The episodes were light-hearted and often funny. The show won prizes and was popular enough to run for nearly two decades.

A much longer-running show could have been built around a similar-sounding question: “What's my tribe?" Humans have asked this question of other humans from the first moment we could talk. But this version of the show wouldn't have won any prizes for humor. Indeed, its question has elicited humanity's darkest emotions, for it touches on some of the most fraught issues in our collective history.

Humans, like other social species, evolved a capacity for determining who their friends were and who their enemies. The former could be expected to be of benefit, the latter of harm. If you were of my tribe, I wouldn’t kill you. If you weren’t, I might.

The identification of friends and enemies was largely cultural and could be taught. Yet there was a biological basis beneath it. Tribes were often kin-folk. The success of my tribe was the success of my genetic line. Evolution programmed humans toward behavior that promoted their genetic lines. In other social animals such behavior could be dramatic. A male lion that takes over a pride from another male often kills the offspring of the lion he deposed. In humans it has typically been more subtle – nepotism, for instance.

Biology and culture combined to shape characteristic responses to challenges that confronted every tribe. A stranger arrives at the village. How is the stranger to be greeted? The safe choice is to kill the stranger. Potential harm is thereby forestalled. But sometimes strangers bring useful goods or knowledge. Killing every stranger would deprive the tribe of benefit. So the optimal strategy is to treat the strangers suspiciously but not at once lethally.

Thus arose attitudes toward immigration. Tribes – call them nations now – that considered themselves sufficient in the necessities of life might bar immigrants entirely. This was the policy of Japan for centuries and of North Korea today. Nations that needed greater numbers – for example, to fend off enemies or replenish populations diminished by disease – accepted the risks from the strangers in order to gain the benefits they brought. The Mexican government of Texas invited American settlers in order to protect Texas against Comanche raids. The Comanches and other tribes went beyond welcoming new members to forcibly capturing them, especially girls and young women who might bear children for the tribe.

Even today the original attitudes toward strangers condition countries’ immigration policies. And not just immigration policies. When Britain as a member of the European Union couldn’t close its borders to immigrants, it left the EU. A perception by many Americans that immigration was out of control played a large role in voters’ rejection of Democrats in the 2024 election.

Tribalism fuels racism, anti-Semitism and other attitudes that distress modern liberal minds. A person who looks different from us is prima facie not one of us. The burden is on him or her to prove usefulness, not on us to demonstrate harm. Better to keep strangers away. Cultural practices, including distinctive religious beliefs and rites, provide a similar warning to the wary. In times of calm, when the tribe feels settled and secure, the heterodox might be permitted residence. But come disturbance or danger, the religious aliens are likely to be expelled.

The racist variant of tribalism provided the rationale for the most striking form of slavery practiced in the last millennium. Tribes had enslaved members of other tribes since time immemorial, but the race-based slavery practiced in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth monetized the practice on an industrial scale. In the Americas it was never the case that all black people were slaves and all slaves black people, but in the southern states of the United States that racial reductionism was a political and legal objective nearly achieved.

The tribalism that manifested as anti-Semitism shifted according to time and place. Jews were seen as different for not sharing predominant Christian or Muslim beliefs and practices. Yet they could be useful, for instance as money lenders not bound by Christian or Muslim anti-usury laws. But their difference made them convenient scapegoats for powerful factions of the predominant tribe, leading to pogroms and the Holocaust.

Americans profess to eschew tribalism – despite a long history of forcible displacement of Indian tribes, race-based slavery, and the post-slavery system of racial segregation. In modern America, tribalism appears not least as political partisanship. Republicans demonize Democrats. Democrats revile Republicans. Each treats the other as an existential threat to the republic. For much of human history, marrying outside the clan or tribe was forbidden. Think Romeo and Juliet and innumerable other star-crossed lovers of myth and literature. In America, marrying outside one’s religion or race was long the great taboo. Today it’s marrying outside one’s political tribe.

Tribalism is not wholly harmful. We humans wouldn’t have survived as long as we have if we hadn’t learned to stick together and tell friend from foe.

Wisdom lies in tempering the worst aspects of tribalism. Turn tribal feelings in positive directions where possible.

This is the best we can expect, because “What’s My Tribe?” is certain to continue its long run.